PERFUME

Every now and then she sighed and deleted a whole chunk of words. It was clear she was having difficulty trying to express herself.
She wished there were windows in the newsroom. Working in the cloistered hothouse environment with its pretty pictures and towering plants was all right as long as you did not have to spend several hours at a stretch in the one room. Then you noticed the lack of natural light. She knew that was one reason why so many of the staff seemed prematurely aged, wrinkles appearing where most people had flat skin, white faces and desolate expressions. It was clear human beings needed a little light in the darkness of their day.
Working for ‘The Nation’ deprived you of all natural light on your working days, unless you were lucky enough to leave the office. Many did not and so they often represented the embodiment of Mummified corpses waiting for official recognition of their everyday condition.
‘No matter,’ she used to murmur to herself. ‘It’s their lives they are wasting. Not my concern.’
Nevertheless, despite her ambition, Alison was not a heartless person and felt sorry for the condition of these people who always struck her as rather sad and desolate.
Almost without exception they all had dreams which had failed for one reason or another. The happiest were the recent failures who were happy to joke about the enormous cock-ups in their lives and how they planned to rescue themselves from what they clearly saw as nothing more than a temporary setback.
There were others, though, who were quite different. They carried themselves as though the world’s cares were resting on their shoulders. These people walked around the newsroom with their backs bent and their clothes never quite fitting properly. When one of them would catch Alison’s eye she would think of the tailor’s dummies which had been left in a shop window overnight, naked and ill-proportioned, a dirty yellow colour with scuff marks where they had landed after being frequently dropped on the floor over many years by careless hands. She always wondered about these dead dummies. Who had decided to leave them so exposed during the long dark hours of the night? Had the new clothes not arrived or had the shop assistants simply been too tired to bother to dress the mannequins for the morning.
She recalled a shop she passed once in East Berlin. It was just off the Friedrichstrasse. She had turned left after passing through the security checks and transferring her proper Deutschemarks into the joke money which the communists had forced tourists to take with them no matter how short their journey.
About a hundred yards up the road she had decided to turn left, heading onto the Unter Den Linden, with the blocked-off Brandenburg Gate in the far distance. Crossing the road she had come across a line of shops where nothing seemed to be on display. Moving closer she realised her eyes had been fooled. There were items for sale. Items which were obviously highly praised by the shop owners and consequently of value to the many would be shoppers in this half a city. Except they had been almost impossible to see.
She recalled one perfume shop in particular. It was part of a large building with a massive front window, of the kind of size found in the prestigious shops fronting Regent Street in Central London. But there the comparison ended. This was no toy shop or sophisticated department store. This was just an exceedingly large window from another age which had been allowed to decay.
There were horrible scratches which collected dust and dirt and formed odd patterns reminding her of the paintings she had made as a child by dripping ink onto paper and then folding it in half.
Through the dark glass she could see a display which quite took away her breath. It was obviously a perfumer’s. The prize bottles of perfume were arrayed on plinths of varying sizes, arranged to show them in their best of lights. Except the bottles were no more than the cheap throwaway miniatures dumped on passengers by airlines. And the plinths they were resting on in their Romanesque glory were just cheap cardboard boxes. Their sides had shrunk and the concave pillars, with their faded colours and dust, barely visible through the dust of the window, seemed to express a forlorn sadness which was somehow ageless.
Alison had felt as she imagined she might have done in the presence of a child who had just discovered that she had been given the cheapest Christmas present in the class.
Something of that feeling struck her now as she cast her eyes around the newsroom looking at the worn figures struggling to better each other in a state of fear and desperation. None of them were the cossetted stars, the highly paid and much lauded public names who seemed to ride the surf of life without ever having to ask for anything more than the best bank in which to deposit their rapidly increasing amounts of money.
She turned back and looked at the screen. It had been taunting her with its inability to provide the correct words to describe the story. Now she had them. They rolled off her fingers and onto the keyboard and then the screen with consummate ease. Alison printed out a copy for herself and then went for a coffee. She stood in the corridor, secretly smoking a cigarette and proof reading her story, before going over to the newsdesk.
‘So this is it, then, is it,’ the chief assistant said as he scrutinized her words.
‘You better get this checked by Simon, before he unleashes the world of the secret services on his back.’
‘I’m about to fax it to his home. I thought you might like a copy first, that’s all.’
The chief had a way of getting right under Alison’s skin. Even the way he said hello in the mornings would drive her mad.
She went back to her desk to wait for the call from Simon.